People may behave differently in the various online roles that they have in everyday life. For example, a person may take the role of a parent when posting family pictures on a picture sharing website, and another role of a stamp collector when participating on a stamp collecting forum. Within each role, the person's behavior also depends on the context. Some of the roles of the person and contexts of the online application may be incompatible with one another. In view of such potential incompatibility, people take great care to insulate the roles and contexts against one another by assuming personas to act within given role-context combinations. For example, a civil servant may not want his posts regarding his celebrity-following activity to be known to his working colleagues.
A persona is an online identity that a person may adapt to play a certain role or to address certain online applications based on contexts of the online applications. In contrast to online pseudonyms, which are disjointed screen names created by a user, personas are tied together to one online identity that can be representative of a real-life identity. Personas are associated with the user's personal attributes, personal information, and activities from the one online identity that the user may utilize in various contexts.
A breakdown of the insulation of a persona can have serious consequences to the person, ranging from awkward situations over strong embarrassment to social stigma and isolation. In other contexts, leakage of information between aspects of a person may even pose a threat to the person. Thus, there is an unmet need to avoid persona breakdown and its associated problems. There is also an unmet need to maintain anonymity across personas where applicable and desired by the user, by hiding the real-life identity of the person associated with the persona.